LIBRAR^OF^CONGRESS^ 

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^ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



JAMES ABEAM GARFIELD. 



EULOGY 



BY 



GEORGE F. HOAR 



EULOGY. 



EULOGY 



Upon the Life, Cuaiucter and Public Seuvices of 



JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD, 



Late President of the United States, 



DELIVERED BY 



HON. GEOllGE F. HOAR, 



AT THE 



invitation of THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF WORCESTER, MASS. 



IN MECHANICS HALL, 



ON FRIDAY EVENING, DECEMBER 30, 1881. 



PRINTED BY ORDER OF THE CITY COUNCIL. 



PRESS OF CHARLES HAMILTON 
No. 311 Main Street. 

1882. 



CITY OF WORCESTER. 

In City Council, Sept. 20, 3 881. 

Ordered, That the Mayor be requested to invite the Hon. 
George F. Hoar to deliver a eulogy on the life and services 
of James Abram Garfield, before the City Council, at such 
time as may suit his convenience. 

In accordance with the above order an invitation was extended 
to Mr. Hoar, and the same was accepted by him. A committee 
of the City Council, consisting of His Honor ^Nla^^or Kelley, and 
Aldermen Marsh, Reed and Goddard ; President Shattuck, of 
the Common Council, and Councilmcn Lancaster, jNIcMahon, 
Booth and Dearborn was appointed to make all necessary 
arrangements for a meeting at Mechanics Hall, on Friday 
evening, December 30, to listen to the eulogy. 

The following orders were passed, December 31 : — 

CITY OF WORCESTER, 

In City Council, Dec. 31, 1881. 

Ordered, That the thanks of the City Council be and they are 
hereby tendered to the Hon. George F. Hoar, for his able 
eulogy on the life and services of James Abram Garfield, 
delivered before this body, December 30. And it is further 

Ordered, That Mr. Hoar be requested to furnish a copy for 
publication. 



EULOGY. 



Mr. Mayor, Gsntlemen of the Glty Coimcil, 

and Felloio- Citizens : 

I SHOULD indulge myself in a strange delusion if I 
hoped to say anything of President Garfield which is 
not already well known to his countrymen, or to add 
further honor to a name to which the judgment of the 
world, with marvellous unanimity, has already assigned 
its place. The public sorrow and love have found 
utterance, if not adequate, yet such as speech, and 
silence, and funeral rite, and stately procession, and 
prayers, and tears, could give. On the twenty-sixth 
day of September, the day of the funeral, a common 
feeling stirred mankind as never before in history. 
That mysterious law, by which, in a great audience, 
every emotion is multiplied in each heart by sympathy 
with ever}'^ other, laid its spell on universal humanity. 
At the touch which makes the whole world kin, all 
barriers of rank, or party, or state, or nation, disap- 
peared. His own Ohio, the State of his birth and of his 
burial, New England, from whose loins came the sturdy 
race from which he descended, whose college gave him 
his education, can claim no pre-eminence in sorrow. 
From farthest south comes the voice of mouining for 

the soldier of the Union. Over fisherman's hut and 
2 



8 

frontiersman's cabin is spread a gloom because the 
White House is desolate. The son of the poor widow 
is dead, and palace and castle are in tears. As the 
humble Campbellite disciple is borne to his long home, 
the music of the requiem fills cathedral arches and the 
domes of ancient synagogues. On the coffin of the canal 
boy a queen lays her wreath. As the bier is lifted, 
word conies beneath the sea that the nations of the 
earth are rising and bowing their heads. From many 
climes, in many languages, they join in the solemn 
service. This is no blind and sudden' emotion, gather- 
ing and breaking like a wave. It is the mourning of 
mankind foi* a great character, already perfectly known 
and familiar. If there be any persons who fear that 
religious faith is dying, that science has shaken the hold 
of the moral law upon the minds of men, let them take 
comfort in asking themselves if any base or ignoble 
passion could have so moved mankind. Modern science 
has called into life these mighty servants. Press and 
Telegraph, who have created a nerve which joins 
together all human hearts and pulses simultaneously 
over the globe. To what conqueror, to what tyrant, to 
what selfish ambition, to what mere intellectual great- 
ness would it not have refused response ? The power 
in the universe that makes for evil, and the power in 
the universe that makes for righteousness, measure 
their forces. A pooi', weak fiend shoots oif his little 
bolt, a single human life is stricken down, and a throb 
of divine love thrills a planet. 

Every American State has its own story of the brave 



9 

and adventurous spirits who were its early settlers ; the 
men who build commonwealths, the men of whom 
commonwealths are biiilded. The history of the settle- 
ment of Massachusetts, of Central Kew York, and of 
Ohio, is the history of the Garfield race. They were, 
to borrow a felicitous phrase, "hungry for the horizon."* 
They were natural frontiersmen. Of the seven genera- 
tions born in America, including the president, not one 
was boi-n in other than a frontiersman's dwelling. Two 
of them, father and son, came over with Winthrop in 
1630. Each of the six generations who dwelt in 
Massachusetts has left an honorable record, still pre- 
served. Five in succession bore an honorable military 
title. Some were fightei's in the Indian wars. " It is 
not in Indian wars," Fisher Ames well sa^^s, " that 
heroes are celebrated, but it is there they are formed." 
At the breaking out of the revolution the male represen- 
tatives of the family were two young brothers. One, 
whose name descended to the president, was in arms at 
Concord Bridge, at sunrise, on the 19th of April. The 
other, the president's great-grandfather, dwelling thirty 
miles off, was on his way to the scene of action before 
noon. When the constitution rejected by Massachusetts 
in 1778 was proposed, the same ancestor, with his fellow 
citizens of the little town of Westminster, voted unani- 
mously for the rejection, and put on record their 
reasons. " It is 'Our opinion that no constitution what- 
ever ought to be established till previously thereto a bill 
of rights be set forth, and the constitution be framed 

♦Senator Ingalls. 



10 

therefrom, so that the lowest capacity may be able to 
determine his natural rights, and judge of the equitable- 
ness of the constitution thereby." 

"And as to the constitution itself, the following 
appears to us exceptionable, viz., the fifth article," 
(excepting negroes, mulattoes and Indians from the 
right to vote) " which deprives a portion of the human 
race of their natural rights on account of their color, 
which, in our opinion, no power on earth has a just 
right to do. It therefore ought to be expunged the 
constitution." 

1^0 religious intolerance descended in the Garfield, 
race. But the creed of this Westminster catechism 
they seem never to have forgotten. 

When the war was over, the same ancestor took his 
young family and penetrated the forest again. He 
established his home in Otsego county, in central New 
York, at the period and amid the scenes made familiar 
by Cooper, in his delightful tale. The Pioneers. Again 
the generations move westward, in the march of civiliza- 
tion keeping ever in the van, until in 1831 James Gar- 
field was born, in a humble Ohio cabin, where he was 
left fatherless in his infancy. In a new settlement the 
wealth of the family is in the right arm of the father. 
To say that the father, who had himself been left an 
orphan when he was an infant, left his son fatherless in 
infancy, is to say that the famil}^ was reduced to ex- 
tremest poverty. 

I have not given this narrative as the story of a mean 
or ignoble lineage. Such men, whether of Puritan, or 



11 

Hng-iienot, or Cavalier stock, have ever been the 
strength and the security of American States. From 
such homes came Webster, and Clay, and Lincoln, and 
Jackson. It is no race of boors that has struck its axes 
into the forests of this continent. These men knew 
how to build themselves log houses in the wilderness. 
They were more skilful still to build constitutions and 
statutes. Slow, cautious, conservative, sluggish, un- 
ready, in ordinary life, their brains move quick and sure 
as their rifles flash, when great controversies that de- 
termine the fate of States are to be decided, when great 
interests that brook no delaj' are at stake, and great 
battles that admit no indecision are to be fought. The 
trained and disciplined soldiers of England could not 
anticipate these alert farmers. On the morning of the 
revolution they were up before the sun. When Wash- 
ington was to be defended, in 1861, the scholar, or the 
lawyer, or the man of the city, dropped his book, left 
his court-house or his counting-room, and foiuid his 
company of yeomen waiting for him. They are ever 
greatest in adversity. I would not undervalue the ma- 
terial of w4iich other republics have been built. The 
polished marbles of Greece and Italy have their own 
grace. But art or nature contain no more exquisite 
beauty than the color which this split and unhewn 
granite takes from the tempest it withstands. There 
was never a race of men on eaith more capable of seeing 
cleai-ly, of grasping, and of holding fast, the great 
truths and great principles which are permanent, sure, 
and safe for the government for the conduct of life, 



12 

alike in private and public concerns. If there be, or 
ever shall be, in this country, a demos, fickle, light- 
minded, easily moved, blind, prejudiced, incapable of 
permanent adherence to what is great or what is true, 
whether it come from the eifeminacy of wealth, or the 
skepticism of a sickly and selfish culture, or the poverty 
and ignorance of great cities, it will find itself power- 
less in this iron grasp. 

Blending with the Saxon stock, young Garfield in- 
herited on the mother's side the qualities of the Hugue- 
nots, those gentler but not less brave or less constant 
Puritans, who, for conscience sake, left their beloved 
and beautiful Prance, whose memory will be kept green 
so long as Maine cherishes Bowdoin College, or Massa- 
chusetts Faneuil Hall, or ISTew York the antique virtue 
of John Jay, or South Carolina her revolutionary history 
— who gave a lustre and a beauty to every place and 
thing they touched. 

The child of such a race, left fatherless in the wilder- 
ness, yet destined to such a glory, was committed by 
Providence to three great teachers, without either of 
whom he would not have become fitted for his distin- 
guished career. These teachers were a wise Christian 
mother, poverty, and the venerable college president, 
who lived to watch his pupil through the whole of his 
varied life, to witness his inauguration amid such high 
hopes, and to lament his death. 

To no nobler matron did ever Koman hero trace his 
origin. Few of the traditions of his Puritan ancestry 
could have come down to the young orphan. It is said 



13 

there were two things with which his mother was specially 
familiar — the Bible, and the rude ballads of the war of 
1812. The child learned the Bible at his mother's knee, 
and the love of country from his cradle-hymns. 

I cannot, within the limits assigned to me, recount 
every circumstance of special preparation which fitted 
the young giant for the great and various parts he was 
to play in the drama of our republican life. It would be 
but to repeat a story whose pathos and romance are all 
known by heart to his countrymen ; the childhood in the 
cabin; the struggle with want, almost with famine; the 
brother proudly bringing his first dollar to buy shoes for 
the little bare feet; the labor in the forest; the growth 
of the strong frame and the massive brain ; the reading 
of the first novel; the boy's longing for the sea; the 
canal boat; the carpenter's shop; the first school; the 
eager thirst for knowledge; the learning that an obstacle 
means only a thing to be overcome; the founding of the 
college at Hiram; the companionship in study of the 
gifted lady whose eulogy he pronounced; the Campbell- 
ite preaching; the ever wise guidance of the mother; 
the marriage to the bright and beautiful schoolmate; we 
know them better even than we know the youth of Wash- 
ington and of Webster. 

General Garfield said in 1878 that he had not long ago 
conversed with an English gentleman, who told him that 
in twenty-five years of careful study of the agricultural 
class in England, he had never known one who was born 
and reared in the ranks of farm laborers that rose above 
his class and became a well-to-do citizen. The story of 



14 

a childhood passed in poverty, of intellect and moral 
nature trained in strenuous contests with adversity, is not 
unfamiliar to those who have read the lives of the men 
who have been successful in this country in any of the 
walks of life. It is one of the most beneficent results of 
American institutions that we have ceased to speak of 
poverty and hardship, and the necessity for hard and 
humble toil, as disadvantages to a spirit endowed by na- 
ture with the capacity for generous ambitions. In a 
society where labor is honoi'able, and where every place 
in social or public life is open to merit, earl}^ poverty is 
no more a disadvantage than a gymnasium to an athlete, 
or drill and discipline to a soldier. 

General Garfield was never ashamed of his origin. lie 

" did not change, but kept in lofty place 

The wisdom which adversity had bred." 

The humblest friend of his boyhood was ever w^elcome 
to him when he sat in the highest seats, where Honor 
was sitting by his side. The ]ioorest laborer was ever 
sure of the sympathy of one who had known all the bit- 
terness of want and the sweetness of bread earned by 
the sweat of the brow. He was ever the simple, plain, 
modest gentleman. When he met a common soldier it 
was not the general or the military hero that met him, 
but the comrade. When he met a scholar it was not the 
learned man, or the college pi'esident, but the learner. 

It was fitting that he who found open the road through 
every gradation of pubHc honor, from the log cabin to 
the Presidency, simi)ly at the price of deserving it, should 
have answered in the same s})cech the sophistries of com- 



15 

munism and the sinister forebodings of Lord Macanlay. 
" Here," he said, " society is not fixed in horizontal lay- 
ers, like the ci*nst of the earth, but, as a great Kew Eng- 
land man said, years ago, it is rather like the ocean, 
broad, deep, grand, open, and so free in all it parts that 
every drop that mingles with the yellow sand at the bot- 
tom, may rise through all the waters, till it gleams in the 
sunshine on the crest of the highest wave. So it is here 
in our free society, permeated with the light of Ameri- 
can freedom. There is no American boy, however poor, 
however humble, orphan though he may be, that, if he 
have a clear head, a true heart, a strong arm, he may not 
rise through all the grades of society, and become the 
crown, the glory, the pillar of the state. Here there is 
no need for the old world war between capital and labor. 
Here is no need of the explosion of social order pre- 
dicted by Macaulay." 

When seeking a place of education in the East, young 
Garfield wrote to several New England colleges. The 
youth's heart was touched and his choice decided by the 
tone of welcome in the reply of Dr. Hopkins, the presi- 
dent of Williams. It was fortunate that his vigorous 
youth found itself under the influence of a very great 
but veiy simple and sincere character. The secret of 
Dr. Hopkins' power over his pupils lay,^As^, in his own 
exami)le, profound scholarship, great practical wisdom, 
perfect openness and sincerity, strong religious faith and 
humility; second, in a careful study of the disposition of 
each individual youth ; third, jmiiiae, absolute, yet accom- 
panied by sympathy and respect, seldom severity, never 

'6 



16 

scorn, in dealing with the errors of boyhood. ^NTo harsh 
and inflexible laAv, cold and pitiless as a winter's sea, 
dealt alike with the shiggish and the generous nature. 
No storm of merciless ridicule greeted the shy, awkward, 
ungainly backwoodsman. And, beyond all, Dr. Hopkins 
taught his pupils that lesson in which some of our col- 
leges so sadly fail — reverence for the republican life of 
which they were to form a part, and for the great history 
of whose glory they were inheritors. 

It was my fortune, on an evening last spring, to see 
the illustrious pupil, I suppose for the last time on earth, 
take leave of the aged teacher whose head the frosts of 
nearly four score winters had touched so lightly, and to 
hear him say at pai'ting, " I have felt your presence at 
the beginning of my administration like a benediction." 

The President delighted in his college. He kept un- 
broken the friendships he formed within her walls. He 
declared that the place and its associations were to him 
a fountain of perpetual youth. He never forgot his debt 
to her. When he was stricken down he was on his 
way, all a boy again, to lay his untarnished laui-els at 
her feet. 

It would have been hard to find in this country a man 
so well equipped by nature, by experience and by 
training, as was Garfield when he entered the Ohio sen- 
ate in 1860, at the age of twenty-eight. He was in his 
own person the representative of the [)laincst life of the 
backwoods and the best culture of the oldest eastern 
communit}^ He had been used in his youth to various 
foi'ms of manual laboi'. The yeais which he devoted to 



17 

his profession of teacher and of college president, were 
years of great industry, in which he disciplined his 
powers of public speaking and original investigation. 
Dr. Hopkins said of him: "There was a large general 
capacity applicable to any subject, and sound sense. 
What he did was done with facility, but by honest and 
avowed work. There was no pretense of genius, or 
alternation of spasmodic eftbrt and of rest, but a satis- 
factory accomplishment in all directions of what was 
undertaken." His sound brain and athletic frame could 
bear great labor without fatigue. He had a thoroughly 
healthy and robust intellect, capable of being directed 
upon any of the pursuits of life, or any of the affairs of 
state in any department of the public service. We 
have no other example in our pubhc life of such mar- 
vellous completeness of intellectual development. He 
exhibited enough of his varied mental capacity to make 
it sure that he could have attained greatness as a meta- 
physician, or a mathematician, in any of the exact 
sciences, as a linguist, as an executive officer, as he did 
in fact attain it as a military commander, as an orator, as 
a debater, and a parliamentary and popular leader. 

The gigantic scale on which the operations of our late 
war were conducted has dwarfed somewhat the achieve- 
ments of individual actors. If in the history of either of 
the other wars in which our people have engaged, whether 
before or after the declaration of independence, such a 
chapter should be found as the narrative of Garfield's 
Kentucky campaign, it would alone have made the name 
of its leader immortal. It is said that General Rose- 



18 

crans received the young schoolmaster with some 
prejudice. "When he came to my headquarters," he 
says, "I must confess that I had a prejudice against 
him, as I understood he was a preacher who had gone 
into politics, and a man of that cast I was naturally op- 
posed to." In his official report Rosecrans says : 

" I especially menticm Brigadier-General Garfield, ever 
active, prudent and sagacious, I feel much indebted to 
him for both counsel and assistance in the administration 
of this army. He possesses the energy and the instinct 
of a great commander." 

We must leave to soldiers and to military historians 
to assign their relative historic importance to the move- 
ments of the war. But we may safely trust the popular 
judgment which pronounces Garfield's ride at Chicka- 
mauga one of its most conspicuous instances of personal 
heroism, and the Kentucky campaign a most brilliant 
example of fertility of resource, combined audacity and 
prudence, sound military judgment, and success against 
great odds. We may safely trust, too, the judgment of 
the accomplished historian,* who pronounces his report 
in favor of the advance that ended with the battle of 
Chickamauga, "the ablest military document submitted 
by a chief of stafi" to his superior during the war." 
AVe may accept, also, the award of Lincoln, who 
made him major-general for his brilliant service at 
Chickamauga, and the confidence of Thomas, who 
off'ered him the command of an ai-my corps. 

Great as was his capacity for military service, the 
judgment of Abraham Lincoln did not cit, when it sum- 

*Mr. Wliilc'liiw Koiil. 



19 

moued him to the field of labor where his greatest 
laurels were won. It is the /fashion, in some quarters, 
to lament the decay of statesmanship, and to make com- 
parisons, by no means complimentary, between persons 
now entrusted with the conduct of public affairs and 
their predecessors. We may at least find consolation in 
the knowiedge that when any of our companions die 
they do not fail to receive full justice from the hearts of 
the people. 

Suppose any of the statesmen w ho preceded the war, 
or some intelligent and not unfriendly foreign observer 
— some De Tocqueville or Macaula}- — to look forAvard 
with Garfield to the duties which confronted him when 
he entered Congress in 1863. With what despair, in the 
light of all past experience, would he have contem- 
plated the future. How insignificant the difficulties 
which beset the men of the preceding seventy years 
compared with those which have crowded the seventeen 
which were to follow. How marvelous the success the 
American people have achieved in dealing with these 
difiiculties compared with that which attended the 
statesmanship of the times of Webster and Clay and 
Calhoun, giants as they were. The greatness of these 
men is not likely to be undervalued anywhere; least of 
all in Massachusetts. They contributed each in his own 
way those masterly discussions of the great principles 
by which the constitution must be interpreted, and the 
economic laAVS on Avhich material prosperity depends, 
which will abide as perpetual forces so long as the re- 
public shall endure. Mr. Webster, especially, aided in 



20 

establishing in the jurisprudence of the country the 
great judgments, which, on the one hand, asserted for 
the national government its most necessary and benefi- 
cent powers, and, on the other hand, have protected 
property and liberty from invasion. lie uttered in the 
senate the immortal argument which convinced the 
American people of the unity of the republic and the 
supremacy and indestructibility of the national authority. 
It has been well said that the cannon of the nation were 
shotted with the reply to Hayne. But the only impor- 
tant and permanent measure with which the name of 
Webster is connected is the Ashburton treaty — an 
achievement of diplomacy of little consequence in com- 
parison with those Avhich obtained from the great powers 
of Europe the relinquishment of the doctrine of per- 
petual allegiance, or with the Alabama treaty of 1871. 
Mr. Clay's life was identified with two great policies — 
the protection of American industry, and the compro- 
mise between slavery and freedom in their strife for 
control of the tei-ritories. When he died the free trade 
tariff" of 1844 was the law of the land, and within two 
years the Missoui-i compromise was repealed. Mr. Cal- 
houn has left behind him the memory of a stainless life, 
great intellectual power and a lost cause. 

To each generc^tion is committed its peculiar task. 
To these men it was given to wake the infant republic 
to a sense of its own great destiny, and to teach it the 
laws of its being, by wliich it must live or bear no life. 
To the men of our time the abstract theories, which 
were only debated in other days, have come as practical 



21 

realities, demanding prompt and final decision on ques- 
tions where error is fatal. 

From the time of Jay's treaty no such problem has 
presented itself to American diplomacy as that which 
the war left as its legacy. The strongest power on 
earth, accustomed, in dealing with other nations, to take 
counsel only of her pride and her strength, had inflicted 
on us vast injury, of which the honor of this country 
seemed pledged to insist on reparation, which England 
conceived hers equally pledged to deny. But in 
domestic afiairs, the difiiculties were even greater. For 
six of the sixteen years that followed the death of Lin- 
coln the president was not in political accord with either 
house of congress. For four others the house w^as of 
diflerent politics from president and senate. During 
the whole time the dominant party had to encounter a 
zealous and able opposition, and to submit its measures 
to a people having apparently the strongest inducements 
to go wrong. The rights of capital were to be deter- 
mined by the votes of labor; debtors to fix the value of 
their payments to their creditors; a people under no 
constraint but their own sense of duty to determine 
whether they would continue to bear the weight of a 
vast debt ; the policy of dealing with the conquered to 
be decided at the close of a long war by the votes of the 
conquerors, among whom every other family was in 
mourning for its dead; finance and currency with their 
subtleties, surpassing the subtleties of metaphysics, to 
be made clear to the apprehension of plain men ; busi- 
ness to be recalled from the dizzy and dangerous 



22 

heights of speculation to moderate gains and safe laws; 
great public ways connecting distant oceans to be 
built; commerce to be diverted into unaccustomed chan- 
nels; the mouth of the Mississippi to be opened; a 
great banking system to be devised and put in operation 
such as was never known before, alike comprehensive 
and safe, through whose veins and arteries credit, the 
life blood of trade, should ebb and flow in the remotest 
extremities of the land; four millions of people to be 
raised from slaveiy to citizenship; millions more to be 
welcomed from foreign lands ; a disputed presidential 
succession to be settled, after an election contest in 
which the country seemed turned into two hostile camps, 
by a tribunal for which the founders of the government 
had made no provision; all this to be accomplished 
under the restraints of a written constitution. 

AVhen this list has been enumerated, the eulogy of 
Garfield, the statesman, has been spoken. There is 
scarcely one of these questions, certainly not more than 
one or two, which he did not anticipate, carefull}^ and 
thoroughly study for himself before it arose, and to 
which he did not contribute an original argument, un- 
surpassed in pei'suasive force. Undoubtedly there were 
others who had more to do with marshaling the political 
forces of the House. But almost from the time he en- 
tered it, he was the leader of its best thought. He was 
ever serious, grave, addressing himself only to the reason 
and conscience of his auditors. 

He lived in a State whose people were evenly divided 
in polities, and on whose decision, as it swayed alter- 



23 

nately from side to side, the fate of the country often 
seemed to depend. You will search his speeches in vain 
for an appeal to a base motive or an evil passion. Many 
men who are called great political leaders, are really 
nothing but great political followers. They study the 
currents of a public sentiment which other men form. 
They use as instruments opinions which they never 
espoused till they became popular. General Garfield 
always consulted with great care the temper of the House 
in the conduct of measures which were under his charge. 
But he was remarkably independent in forming his 
judgments, and inflexible in adhering to them on all great 
essential questions. His great friend and commander, 
General Thomas, whose stubborn courage saved the day 
in the great battle for the possession of Tennessee, was 
well called " the rock of Chickamauga." In the greater 
battle in 1876, for the nation's honor, Garfield well de- 
served to be called the "rock of Ohio." Everything he 
did and said manifested the serious, reverent love of 
excellence. He had occasion often to seek to win to his 
opinion masses of men composed largely of illiterate 
persons. No man ever heard from his lips a sneer at 
scholarship. At the same time, he never made the 
scholar's mistake of undervaluing the greatness of the 
history of his own country, or the quality of his own 
people. 

The limits of this discourse do not permit me to enter 
into the detail of the variety and extent of his service 
in debate, in legislation, and in discussions before the 
people. I could detain you until midnight were I to re- 

4 



24 

count from my own memory the great labors of the 
twelve years that it was my privilege to share with him 
in the public service, for four of which I sat almost by 
his side. Everybody who had a new thought brought 
it to him for hosj)itable welcome. Did Science or Schol- 
arship need anything of the government, Garfield was 
the man to whom they came. While charged with the 
duty of supervising the details of present legislation, he 
was always foreseeing and preparing for the future. In 
the closing years of the war, while chairman of the com- 
mittee of military affairs, he was studying finance. 
Later he had prepared himself to deal with the defects 
in the civil service. I do not think the legislation of the 
next twenty years will more than reach the ground 
which he had already occupied in his advanced thought. 
General Garfield gave evidence of vast powers of 
oratory on some very memorable occasions. But he 
made almost no use of them as a means of persuading 
the people to conclusions where great public interests 
were at stake. Sincerity, directness, full and perfect 
understanding of his subject, clear logic, manly dignity, 
simple and apt illustration, marked all his discourse. 
But on a few great occasions, such as that in I*^ew York, 
when the people were moved almost to frenzy by the 
assassination of Lincoln, or in the storm which moved 
the great human ocean at the convention at Chicago, he 
showed that he could touch with a master's hand the 
chords of a mighty instrument: 

siicli as raised 
To lici^lit of iiohlcsl (I'liipcr luToi'S old, 
Anuiiijr to l)altl(', and iii'^tcail of rage 



25 

Deliberate viilor t)rcatlie(l, liriu aucl uumoved 
With dread of death to flight or foul retreat ; 
Nor wanting power to mitigate and sviage • 

With soleiuu touches, troubled thoughts, and chase 
Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain 
From mortal or immortal minds. 

When General Garfield took the oath of office as 
President, lie seemed to those who knew him best, 
though in his fiftieth year, still in the prime of a splen- 
did and vigorous youth. He was still growing. We 
hoped for him eight years of brilliant administration, 
and then, in some form or place of service, an old age 
like that of Adams, whom, in variety of equipment, 
alone of our presidents he resembled. What was best 
and purest and loftiest in the aspiration of America 
seemed at last to have laid its hand on the helm. Under 
its beneficent rule we hoped, as our country entered on 
its new career of peace and prosperity, a nobler liberty, 
a better friendship, a purer justice, a more lasting broth- 
erhood. 

But he was called to a sublimer destiny. He had 
ascended along and up the heights of service, of success, 
of greatness, of glory; ever raised by the people to 
higher ranks for gallant and meritorious conduct on each 
field, until by their suifrages he stood foremost among 
men of the foremost among nations. But in the days 
of his sickness and death he became the perpetual wit- 
ness and example how much greater than the achieve- 
ments of legislative halls, or the deeds of the field of 
battle, are the household virtues and simple family afiec- 
tions which all men have within their reach; how much 



26 

greater than the lessons of the college, or the camp, or 
the congress, are the lessons learned at mothers' knees. 
The honors paid to Garfield are the protest of a better 
age and a better generation against the vnlgar heroisms 
of the past. Go through their mausoleums and under 
their triumphal arches and see how the names inscribed 
there shrink and shrivel compared with that of this 
Christian soldier, whose chiefest virtues, after all, are of 
the fireside, and the family circle, and of the dying bed. 
Here the hero of America becomes the hero of humanity. 
We are justified then in saying of this man that he has 
been tried and tested in ever}^ mode by which the quality 
of a human heart and the capacity of a human intellect 
can be disclosed; by adversity, by prosperity, by pov- 
erty, by wealth, by leadership in deliberative assemblies, 
and in the perilous edge of battle, by the height of 
power and of fame. The assay was to be completed by 
the final test — by the certain and visible approach of 
death. As he comes out into the sunlight, more and 
more clearly does his country behold a greatness and 
symmetry which she is to see in their true and full pro- 
portions only when he lies in the repose of death. 

As sometimes in a dead man's face, 
To those that watcli it more and more, 
A likeness, liardly seen before, 
Comes out, to some one of his race ; 

So, dearest, iiow thy l)r()ws arc coUl, 
I see thee what lliou arl , and know 
Tliy likeness to the wise ))clow, 
Tliy kiiuh-ed with tlie jrreat of old. 

Let us not boast at the funeral of our dead. Such a 



27 

temper would be doubly odious in the presence of such 
expressions of hearty sympathy from governments of 
every form. But we should be unfaithful to ourselves 
if in asking for this man a place in the world's gallery 
of illustrious names we did not declare that we ofier him 
as an example of the products of Freedom. With 
steady and even step he walked from the log cabin and 
the canal path to the school, to the college, to the battle- 
field, to the halls of legislation, to the White House, to 
the chamber of death. The ear in which the voices of 
his countrymen, hailing him at the pinnacle of human 
glory, had scarcely died out, heard the voice of the dread 
archangel, and his countenance did not change. Is not 
that country worth dying for whose peasantry are of 
such a strain? Is not the constitution worth standing 
by under whose forms Freedom calls such men to her 
high places? Is not the Union worth saving which 
gives all of us the property of countrymen in such a 
fame? 



